Читать книгу Lydia Bailey - Kenneth Roberts - Страница 6

Table of Contents

Thomas Bailey lived in a three-story brick house on Hanover Street. The name on the doorplate read Faulkner, and it was Harriet Faulkner, mistress of the house and Thomas Bailey’s cousin, who admitted me.

Mrs. Faulkner was a thoughtful-looking, dark-haired, dark-eyed woman perhaps a year older than I. When I first saw her, I thought her thin and austere, even scrawny. Her cheeks were hollow, and she had a long neck, and I told myself that there was something about Boston that put ice-water instead of blood into the veins of everyone in the whole frosty town.

When I said I wanted to see Mr. Bailey, she looked at me so coldly and asked my business so sharply that I disliked her manner even more than I disliked her looks; and when I gave her what I considered a sufficiently complete answer, she studied me impassively and kept on asking questions: What was my age, was I married, who were my associates in Portland? How had I come to know Mr. Bailey? What were my politics?

When she found me evasive, she told me abruptly that Mr. Bailey was ill—too ill to receive callers; and I think that if I hadn’t been firm with her she’d have contrived to shut the door in my face, making it look as though the door had closed of its own accord.

When she saw I was determined to come in, she turned on me a smoldering, smoky look that suggested she might possibly be less austere than I’d thought. As she preceded me up the stairs to the top floor, I saw she wasn’t as thin as I’d thought, either. She had a willowy way of bending over, almost as though she hadn’t a bone in her body; there was a pungent, powdery perfume about her when she moved, the odor of orris root; and a dry swishing sound came from her skirts; so that a man’s senses, unless he were blind, deaf, and noseless, were acutely conscious of her.

I could see with half an eye that Harriet Faulkner took good care of her lodger; for when I got to the third floor I was shown into a sitting-room that was neat as a pin, and strikingly furnished with oriental objects—wall-hangings embroidered in gold and silver, a rug as beautiful as a painting, a statue of a many-armed goddess wearing a crown set with bluish stones across each of which moved a band of light, so that the statue seemed to be watching me from a score of eyes. The windows, which were spotless, looked across Boston harbor and the mouth of the Charles River to Bunker Hill and the Mystic marshes. Beyond the sitting-room was a bedroom. Harriet Faulkner opened the door, walked in, and gave a twitch to the bedclothes.

“Here’s a man to see you about the trial, Cousin Thomas,” she said. She gave me a curiously penetrating look. “Mr. Hamlin wouldn’t take No for an answer, but I want to make it clear that he’s not to tire you out and get you to coughing.”

She stared me straight in the eyes and threw back her shoulders defiantly. I saw then that her throat was as smooth and white as a child’s, and that her breasts were small and round instead of drooping, as I’d first thought. There was something sleek about her, and restive, so that I had an inclination to stroke her arm, as one might stroke an uneasy animal.

Most emphatically I’d been mistaken in Harriet Faulkner’s thinness; but there was no chance for such an error about Thomas Bailey, for his body, beneath the bedclothes, was like a bundle of long bones. His bushy jet-black hair had receded from his forehead to the top of his head, to form a sort of black halo. It was hard to tell his age, for his hollow cheeks were flushed and his lips scarlet, as if he were all afire inside. He had been scribbling on a pad of paper, laced together with shoestring, and the floor near the bed was littered with sheets covered with sprawling writing.

When I told him I was Colonel Tyng’s nephew and had come to Boston at the colonel’s expense to help defend him, he gave me a clammy hand, motioned to the chair beside the bed, and spoke in a remote whisper, as if his mind as well as his body moved on tiptoe.

“Very kind of you, my boy. Very kind of you and Colonel Tyng, too. Most encouraging thing about the whole business is people’s kindness. Even some of the Federalists have been kind—a most interesting sign, Mr. Hamlin. More and more people are finding out what we’ve found out. They won’t stand it much longer. No: not much longer! But the fact remains that they still are standing it! They still can’t understand they’ve got to fight Federalist persecution! They still can’t understand they’ll never be free so long as all their judges are Federalists first and judges afterward.” He started to cough, changed his mind, and held his breath until his face was crimson.

Harriet Faulkner looked pleadingly at me, and I now realized to my amazement that she was almost beautiful.

“Wouldn’t it be better if you didn’t talk?” I asked Bailey. “Wouldn’t it be better if I put questions to you and you wrote the answers?”

He shook his head emphatically. “No, I want to talk! They’re bound to kill me before they’re through with me, so I’ll have my say while I can. What is it you want to know?”

When I looked doubtfully toward Harriet Faulkner, who had gone to stand at the window and seemingly intended to stay there, Bailey made a gesture of protest. “Don’t hesitate to speak before Cousin Hattie,” he whispered. “Cares for me like a sister. Say anything you like before Hattie.”

Harriet turned from the window and fixed me with a level glance. “Cousin Thomas depends upon me, Mr. Hamlin. If anything happened to him and I shouldn’t be here, I’d never forgive myself! Never!” She came to the side of the bed, picked up the scattered papers from the floor, pushed deftly at the sick man’s pillows so that they were miraculously raised beneath his head, and made me so painfully conscious of her kindness and my own lack of perception that I got to my feet and moved to the head of the bed, so to be out of her way.

Then for the first time I saw, hanging on the wall opposite the bed, a small portrait of a young girl, her hair black, parted in the middle, and gathered up in a little crown of curls as if to let her pretty ear peep out, her eyes—which she might have just raised to meet my own—as blue as a far-off mountain on a summer evening, her shoulders sloping like those of a child, and her round arms a pearly pink against the purple velvet of her gown. Held lightly in her slender fingers was a miniature of a girl, even younger than she.

I make no pretense of knowing the whys and the wherefores of that peculiar mental state which leads a man to be fascinated by one woman to the exclusion of all others. With some men, apparently, it’s due to their own inflamed imagination; with others, a matter of persistent and ruthless action on the woman’s part. In some cases, probably, the man is temporarily sick. I’m reasonably sure of only one thing: that there’s no possible way to explain why a seemingly rational and sensible person should arrive at the inflexible conclusion that a given woman, often witless, sometimes misshapen, usually wholly helpless, is a paragon of all the virtues, a unique and veritable angel accidentally dropped out of Paradise. So I can’t explain why I was affected by that portrait. I only know I felt a sudden desire to have it for my own.

To me there was something heartbreakingly gay about the almost smiling lips and the sidelong glance of the girl in the picture—something intimate and personal that caught so unexpectedly at my throat that when I tried to ask, “Who’s that?” I had to cough and try again.

“That was my niece, Lydia,” Thomas Bailey said. “Lydia Bailey. She died last year in Haiti.”

There was just a hint of Harriet Faulkner in the portrait, but there was also a quality of unquenchable youth that Harriet Faulkner certainly had never possessed. Even if the girl in the portrait had lived to be a hundred, she would have remained always young in mind and spirit; whereas Harriet Faulkner had, I suspected, even as a child, been as old in wisdom and seriousness as the Cumæan Sibyl. Consequently, while the portrait faintly resembled Harriet, it wasn’t like her at all. Harriet, when I had first seen her, had given me the impression of cold austerity, but the girl in the portrait couldn’t ever have given anyone that impression.

“What a pity!” I said. “What a shame! When—where did she——”

Harriet Faulkner, in the act of tucking in the sheets on the opposite side of the bed, raised reproving eyes to mine.

“Yellow fever in San Domingo—or Haiti, rather,” she said. “We don’t speak about it. It was a great blow to Cousin Thomas.”

“I can well believe it,” I said. “Yes, I can well believe it. She——”

Harriet shook her head warningly, came around the bed and placed her hand upon my arm. I could feel its warmth burning through my sleeve, and it had a weight and a clinging quality that were surprising in a woman I had thought angular and austere.

When I nodded apologetically and sat down again in my chair with my back to the portrait, Harriet put her hand on mine as if to thank me. Her hand fastened so strongly on my fingers that my eyes went quickly to her face. Since she seemed unconscious of my gaze, however, and left the room impassively, I told myself that I had been right in the beginning: she did have ice-water in her veins, after all.

I continued to be as conscious of that picture as though I were facing it. I could feel its smiling eyes silently urging me to look around; silently begging me to understand the meaning of that sidelong glance. The impact of those eyes upon me was as physical a thing as the pressure of Harriet Faulkner’s hand had been, and the pressure seemed to be upon my heart.

Thomas Bailey was speaking, but so disturbing was the influence of the portrait behind me that I couldn’t concentrate on what he said until I turned my chair so that I could meet those pictured eyes.

“Briefly,” Thomas Bailey said, “your defense should be based on the injustices already perpetrated under the Alien and Sedition Law. In my office you’ll find a complete account of the Matthew Lyon case in Vermont—how the Federalists in that state persecuted and tortured Lyon for telling the simple truth about the ridiculous pomp and selfish avarice of President Adams.”

Matthew Lyon! That was the man of whom my uncle had spoken! Persecuted and tortured! My uncle hadn’t made it clear, but it was clear to me now—though I’m not sure what made it clear: Thomas Bailey, or Harriet Faulkner’s personality, or my unexplainable interest in that dead girl’s picture. Whichever it was, I suddenly felt a hot indignation that Thomas Bailey should have suffered from the workings of a law so indefensible, so barbarous as the Alien and Sedition Act—the law that until yesterday I had considered merely injudicious.

“Matthew Lyon,” I repeated, entering the name in my case-book.

Bailey sighed. “Make your blood run cold, the Matthew Lyon case will, but I doubt if you’ll be allowed to mention it—not before a Federalist judge who’ll do his utmost to protect that other Federalist judge who found Matthew Lyon guilty of telling the truth about politicians.”

“I can try,” I said. “No judge on earth can stop me from trying!”

“I hope not,” Bailey said. “I wish you could bring out how the Reverend John Ogden of Vermont was jailed because he dared to carry a petition to Congress in behalf of Matthew Lyon. I wish you could tell how a packed jury in Windsor, Vermont, sent Anthony Haswell to jail for two months because he said certain Federalist officials were worthless. I wish you could tell how Judge Chase imposed a year-and-a-half jail sentence and a four-hundred-dollar fine on an undefended man who dared say a good word for Thomas Jefferson.”

“I’ll tell all of ’em,” I returned. “Why shouldn’t I?”

“Well, they’re court records, of course, witnessed and sworn to; but if you try to get them before a jury with Chase on the bench, you may be put in jail.”

“I’ll do the worrying about that,” I said, and I meant it. I could see that Bailey was a good man, deeply loved by Harriet Faulkner. I couldn’t disappoint Bailey, or Harriet Faulkner, or that girl in the picture. No hardship, it suddenly seemed to me, would seem excessive if by undergoing it I could make people more aware of the enormities that Federalists were inflicting on them!

Bailey nodded, coughed, then rolled over on his left side to ease the violence of his coughing. He coughed and he coughed—great racking coughs that doubled him up. Fumblingly he brought out a handkerchief and pressed it to his lips. As if by magic the linen was splashed with scarlet, and he sank exhausted against the pillows.

“My God, Mr. Bailey,” I said, “you can’t stand trial! What in God’s name are these Federalist butchers trying to do to this country, anyway!” Distressed by his condition, I got up to walk the floor.

“Wait,” he whispered. “Always feel better after a little bleeding. Don’t like to be left alone. Makes me depressed. Talk about something. Tell me about Portland—about anything that interests you. Old newspaper man like me finds it restful.”

“I’ll talk about you!” I replied. “It’s sheer wanton brutality to bring you to trial.”

“Yes,” Bailey murmured, “sheer wanton brutality. That’s politics. Always consistent, politicians are—always descend to sheer wanton brutality, flavored with idiocy, when they’re threatened with loss of position or loss of power. Try to ruin everybody who’s against ’em! This wouldn’t be a bad world if it weren’t for the people in it.”

He looked up at the little portrait of his niece. “Strange how things come about. Two years ago, you’d have thought nothing could happen to either of us. Now she’s gone, and I soon will be.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “Those who fight for what’s right are never gone. They’re always with us. Look at that picture! She’s not gone! Why, she’s on the verge of speaking.”

“I know,” Bailey said. “That’s why I keep her in front of me all the time. Striking face, hasn’t she?”

“Yes,” I said, “she has. I’ll never forget her.” It was true, though it didn’t lessen my desire to have the portrait for my own, so that I could constantly refresh my memory of it. “But we’d better discuss the Matthew Lyon case,” I said. “Was he——”

“No, no!” Bailey said. “Does me good to talk about Lydia to someone who likes her picture. Looks a little like Hattie—just enough to upset her. Not that she’d ever show it. Too kind-hearted, Hattie is, to bear malice.”

“I can see that,” I said. “How did your niece happen to go to San Domingo in the first place?”

“Well, she was teaching school in Philadelphia—a school that my brother David had started. He’d have liked me to help him, but I was a rolling stone—an irresponsible fool forever hunting romance in strange places. I went to India to publish a newspaper, and it took me five years to realize that there’s mighty little difference between a newspaper office in India and one in Boston: merely hotter and dirtier, and a lot worse-smelling, and the typesetters don’t wear anything but underdrawers and diapers—grown men, too. When I came back, David was dead and Lydia was alone in the world. Meanwhile she’d grown up into that——” He raised a listless hand toward the portrait.

“I wanted her to come to Boston and keep house for me, but Hattie thought it might make talk, and probably it would have. You know how people are about a girl as pretty as that! Anyway, I always wanted to do something for her—felt uncomfortable because I couldn’t do more. Had her on my mind a lot. The picture shows why, somehow.”

“It does indeed!”

“Yes,” Bailey went on. “Well, a sea captain came to the office one day to put an advertisement in the paper. Friend of his in San Domingo—rich French planter—titled family—wanted a teacher and companion for his two little boys—big pay—fine opportunity. I said to him, ‘Got just the one for you, and you won’t have to pay for an advertisement.’ So I sent word to Lydia and arranged her passage to San Domingo. That’s how I happened to have that picture: she wouldn’t let me pay for her passage unless I took the picture. It’s not a bad painting, Mr. Hamlin. It was done by Gilbert Stuart, the Philadelphia painter, to pay for a relative’s schooling—smaller than he usually painted, but that does it no harm. That miniature she’s holding is Stuart’s relative, who was greatly attached to her. Never knew anybody who wasn’t attached to her, except——” He hesitated, started to cough again, but choked it down in a few seconds.

“You’ll have to stop,” I said.

He shook his head. “I’d rather talk. I should have done more for her before she went. I had some jewels—Indian rajah gave them to me because he liked something I wrote about him—two cat’s-eyes, size of partridge eggs; and ten rubies, one for each finger and two big ones for the thumbs. I didn’t need ’em, and she might have used ’em. Don’t know why I didn’t give ’em to her, since she’d have inherited ’em in the end, anyway.

“Same thing’s true of my twenty shares in the Barque Kingfisher. The damned French seized her in the West Indies when we wouldn’t come to their help against the British, as we’d promised to do, and I’ll never get a penny out of ’em. But there was Lydia, right on the spot; and if the shares had been hers, it wouldn’t have surprised me at all if she’d got some sort of settlement out of the French. Able, Lydia was. If you were on the wrong side of an argument, she could make you feel pretty uncomfortable just by looking at you.”

“What were the twenty shares worth?”

“About sixteen thousand dollars. There were something like a hundred puncheons of rum in the cargo, and a lot of indigo.”

“That would be quite a windfall,” I said. “I suppose your Cousin Harriet inherits, now that your niece is dead.”

“Yes,” Bailey said. “Hattie’ll get everything. She’s been mighty kind to me! A fine woman, always cheerful in the face of adversity.”

“Where’s her husband?”

“Lost at sea,” he replied. “They were on a voyage together, and he went overboard when they were crossing the bar at the mouth of the Mississippi. He never had a chance.”

Bailey rolled over on his side and again burst into racking, wrenching coughs that splattered his handkerchief with bright blood.

I ran to the door, called Harriet Faulkner, and stood watching her as she hurried up the stairs and into the room, slipped the pillows from under Thomas Bailey’s head, bathed his face and forehead, and murmured soothingly to him. She seemed an angel of mercy in very truth. When she looked up at me, she put her finger to her lips; then held out her hand and clutched mine almost fiercely.

“It’s not your fault!” she said. “Don’t think I blame you, Mr. Hamlin! But abrupt visits are too difficult—too exciting. You must come to this house, Mr. Hamlin—make it your home! Then he’ll be used to you—it won’t excite him so!”

Even before I had a chance to protest, which I had no thought of doing, she again pressed my hand in a manner that forever put an end to any notion that she had even a thimbleful of ice-water in her veins.

That was the beginning of Harriet Faulkner’s fascination for me, and of my attachment to her interests—an attachment that I can’t exactly say I was to come to regret, since any sort of experience, no matter how unpleasant, is bound to be of value to any man capable of putting pen to paper.